Thursday, March 5, 2015

50 Shades of CPAC

50 Shades of CPAC

We’re back! For a variety of personal and professional
reasons, the two primary contributors to this blog have been on something of a
hiatus since last summer. Speaking for myself, I’ve been as busy as I’ve ever
been in my professional life trying to make demonstrable progress on four
working papers under a 3-3 teaching load. There are times I truly envy my
friends in the private sector who only have to work 40-50 hours over a five day
work week…

In an attempt to hit the ground running, I’d thought I’d
elaborate a bit upon John Sides’ take on this go around of the annual CPAC
conference. In perhaps what is the best commentary I’ve seen on the event yet,
@monkeycageblog tweeted out this gem:

Let me preface the discussion with this: within my short
life as a political scientist, I’ve seen clear changes, good progress really,
in how the media covers the invisible primary. A decade or so ago, if the words
“invisible” and “primary” happened to collide together in the same sentence,
your average journalist, perhaps political scientist even, wouldn’t have had
the foggiest idea of what it was referring to. Compare that to the last couple
of presidential election cycles where reporters have routinely begun to refer
to the process and report on it in a much more informed fashion. This is
clearly a case where political science’s engagement with journalists has had a positive
impact on popular media coverage. Despite this wide recognition of the
importance of the invisible primary in steering the parties towards nominees on
the part of a growing number of journalists, the media tends to focus on
invisible primary events that are most conspicuous. And in this instance, it means
focusing in on the wrong place.

The problem with the CPAC conference is that this particular
piece of low hanging fruit is probably the least useful in getting a grasp on
which candidates are in doing best in the ongoing deliberations amongst policy
activists within the Republican party network. The history of success at CPAC
is far from perfect in predicting the eventual nomination. Let’s face it, the comments of a few fringe candidates make for
interesting news items, despite the fact that they test my faith in democracy in
general and more narrowly make me wonder how I ever had sympathies with this
particular crowd in years past (yes, it can be painful, hence the title). Couple
that with the fact that the straw poll gives a nice quantifiable capstone to
the event, you can see why journalists pay it a great deal of attention. However, CPAC is
at best a snapshot of the opinions of a few of the “fringier” factions within
the party. Libertarian-ish types, check; Populist Tea Party-ish types, check; a
good showing of Republican office holders, [crickets].

We know from experience, that the support of members of congress,
governors, and other elected office holders is absolutely key in winning the
invisible primary because of the organizational resources that they bring with
them and the cues they give to others in the party. Voters do indeed take heed to the opinions of the "elite". When the key party actors aren’t present in force for the
conversation taking place at CPAC, whatever visible cues we get from conference
will be a mighty incomplete picture of the party wide deliberation.

So props
Senator Rand Paul for his continued sweep of this series. And, a shout out to
Scott Walker for nearly pulling off a dark horse win. But when you’re a dark
horse behind Rand Paul, from a crowd that barely resembles the key constituents
of the Republican party network, neither of them, nor Republicans, nor the general public,
should be taking any of these results to the bank. I dare say we should stick with Prof. Sides, and look elsewhere for clues as to who's really cleaning up in the invisible primary.